truth of their lives. Social change happens when the old stories we tell ourselves to survive are no longer sufficient, and we create new ones.
The anger of men-children shut out of the future they were promised can be productive. Those lost kids peopled Occupy Wall Street, fronted the student uprisings of the century’s tweenage years with precocious sloganeering and red-hot rage.
I watched transfixed as the mournful young men I’d spent so long trying to drag out of the house and down to the dole office to fill in applications for jobs that weren’t there were transfigured into adults. They stood taller. I watched them stand on steps of occupied squares and make speeches, and then I saw them stand aside so that women and people of colour could speak too, and that sacrifice of space and privilege was suddenly in the squares. In those few days between the opening up of the protest camps and the influx of police beating and arresting and loading tents and books into dumpster trucks to be pulped, there was space for everyone.
At least, that’s how it seemed. But then the music stopped. The police came in with guns and gas to clear the camps, but even before they had done so, rancour and suspicion had settled in. You see, even in these temporary autonomous zones, in these brief magical spaces opening up across the world to let in freeloaders and free-thinkers and revolutionaries and lost kids to hold the space for as long as they could stand, even there, there was rape.
For three years after the groundswell of grassroots rage that swept the globe in 2011, the fledgling counterculture fractured and fractured again over its own inability to deal with male privilege and sexual violence. Groups split. Angry lines were drawn in ground that had only recently been reclaimed by the young and hungry. It was heart-breaking to watch.
In 2010, the world’s most powerful activist, Julian Assange, was arrested on rape charges he refused even to answer, and marginalised men-children across the world held his face on posters, telling the carrion-feeding cameras come to feast on the still twitching carcass of the renascent left that state surveillance was immoral, that whistle-blowers should be protected – and that women lie.
At Occupy, women were raped in their tents and sexually assaulted at sit-ins. In Baltimore, in Dallas, in Cleveland, in Glasgow. 11 At Occupy London a prominent activist who was tried and acquitted for the rape of two female comrades kept a list of sexual conquests on the wall of his tent. The list began, according to his defence, ‘as a joke with other men’ at the camp. 12
At the same time, the online dissident group Anonymous published a Survival Guide for Citizens in a Revolution, 13 intended, quite seriously, ‘for citizens who feel they are about to be caught up in a violent uprising’. A whole page of the guide was dedicated to a ten-point plan for avoiding rape, including the following advice: ‘try to appear undesirable and unattractive’, ‘never go out alone’ and ‘do not wear skirts’. The people who wrote this guide meant well, as do most men who instruct women to live in fear for their own good. The authors of the guide take pains to reassure us that these hypothetical circumstances are not normal: ‘what might be okay in a stable society’ – wearing clothes that show your thighs, for instance – ‘will get you in deep trouble in times when there is no backed law enforcement’.
What is a stable society? I’ve never heard of one, never lived in one, not here, not anywhere. If women’s bodies are fair game outside ‘stable society’ then hell, we’re always fair game. Show me a society that’s stable that isn’t a miserable police state; show me law enforcement that gives less than two shits about protecting women from rape and assault if they’re not wealthy and white.
Socialism without feminism is no socialism worth having, and men and boys are beginning to learn,
The anger of men-children shut out of the future they were promised can be productive. Those lost kids peopled Occupy Wall Street, fronted the student uprisings of the century’s tweenage years with precocious sloganeering and red-hot rage.
I watched transfixed as the mournful young men I’d spent so long trying to drag out of the house and down to the dole office to fill in applications for jobs that weren’t there were transfigured into adults. They stood taller. I watched them stand on steps of occupied squares and make speeches, and then I saw them stand aside so that women and people of colour could speak too, and that sacrifice of space and privilege was suddenly in the squares. In those few days between the opening up of the protest camps and the influx of police beating and arresting and loading tents and books into dumpster trucks to be pulped, there was space for everyone.
At least, that’s how it seemed. But then the music stopped. The police came in with guns and gas to clear the camps, but even before they had done so, rancour and suspicion had settled in. You see, even in these temporary autonomous zones, in these brief magical spaces opening up across the world to let in freeloaders and free-thinkers and revolutionaries and lost kids to hold the space for as long as they could stand, even there, there was rape.
For three years after the groundswell of grassroots rage that swept the globe in 2011, the fledgling counterculture fractured and fractured again over its own inability to deal with male privilege and sexual violence. Groups split. Angry lines were drawn in ground that had only recently been reclaimed by the young and hungry. It was heart-breaking to watch.
In 2010, the world’s most powerful activist, Julian Assange, was arrested on rape charges he refused even to answer, and marginalised men-children across the world held his face on posters, telling the carrion-feeding cameras come to feast on the still twitching carcass of the renascent left that state surveillance was immoral, that whistle-blowers should be protected – and that women lie.
At Occupy, women were raped in their tents and sexually assaulted at sit-ins. In Baltimore, in Dallas, in Cleveland, in Glasgow. 11 At Occupy London a prominent activist who was tried and acquitted for the rape of two female comrades kept a list of sexual conquests on the wall of his tent. The list began, according to his defence, ‘as a joke with other men’ at the camp. 12
At the same time, the online dissident group Anonymous published a Survival Guide for Citizens in a Revolution, 13 intended, quite seriously, ‘for citizens who feel they are about to be caught up in a violent uprising’. A whole page of the guide was dedicated to a ten-point plan for avoiding rape, including the following advice: ‘try to appear undesirable and unattractive’, ‘never go out alone’ and ‘do not wear skirts’. The people who wrote this guide meant well, as do most men who instruct women to live in fear for their own good. The authors of the guide take pains to reassure us that these hypothetical circumstances are not normal: ‘what might be okay in a stable society’ – wearing clothes that show your thighs, for instance – ‘will get you in deep trouble in times when there is no backed law enforcement’.
What is a stable society? I’ve never heard of one, never lived in one, not here, not anywhere. If women’s bodies are fair game outside ‘stable society’ then hell, we’re always fair game. Show me a society that’s stable that isn’t a miserable police state; show me law enforcement that gives less than two shits about protecting women from rape and assault if they’re not wealthy and white.
Socialism without feminism is no socialism worth having, and men and boys are beginning to learn,
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